BEN-GURION,
David (1886-1973).
top of page
Statesman and political leader David Ben-Gurion became the first prime minister
and chief architect of the state of Israel. He was revered as "Father
of the Nation."
Ben-Gurion was born David Gruen on Oct. 16, 1886, in the town of Plonsk,
Poland. His father was a leader in the movement to reclaim Palestine as
a homeland for the oppressed Jews of Eastern Europe. The idea of an independent
Israel became the leading motivation in Ben-Gurion's life. At age 20 he
immigrated to Palestine and worked for several years as a farmer. He adopted
the Hebrew name Ben-Gurion and joined the Zionist Socialist movement. At
the 1907 Socialist convention he made sure that the party platform contained
the statement: "The party aspires to the political independence of
the Jewish people in this land."

DAVID
BEN-GURION ZIONIST-SOCIALIST
Davidson, Lawrence, Zionism, socialism
and United States support for the Jewish colonization of
Palestine in the 1920s.., Vol. 18, Arab Studies Quarterly
(ASQ), 06-01-1996, pp 1(16).

( Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ) )

There can be no doubt that Zionism in Palestine from
the 1920s onward was increasingly dominated
by socialists. As Walter Laqueur tells us: "Labor
Zionism emerged as [the movement's] strongest
political force. Its growth and the impact of its ideas
were of decisive importance, for it shaped the
character of the Zionist movement and subsequently the
state of Israel. . . ." Moreover, in the 1920s
the Zionist socialists, or "Labor Zionists"
were "powerfully attracted by Russian Socialism and its
leaders."(11)

Among the main leaders of this Zionist socialist phenomenon
was David Ben Gurion. For Ben
Gurion it was Palestine's destiny to be "developed
as a socialist Jewish state."(12) Here the model
was the early Soviet state. "We are following a
new path," Ben Gurion explained in 1921, "which
contradicts developments in the whole world except Russia."
(13) This led him to pay homage to the
Soviet Union for "her great spiritual influence
on our movement and our work in Palestine."(14) In
these years Ben Gurion came to "idolize Lenin"
and "he even adopted the dress of the Soviet leaders
- a quasi military uniform of rough wool."(15)

Behind Ben Gurion was a growing and well organized
Zionist socialist organization. It began as a
group called Poale Zion (Workers of Zion) based largely
in Eastern Europe and Palestine. From this
beginning it merged in March of 1919 with like-minded
Zionist organizations to form Adhut
Ha'avodah, a socialist party that largely controlled
the Jewish immigrant absorption process in
Palestine and would come to dominate the Histadrut, the
labor federation that would eventually
organize and control much of the Jewish economic structure
in Palestine and, later, Israel.(16) Under
Ben Gurion's leadership Adhut Ha'avodah evolved as a
party that "followed the Russian model".(17)

The evolving socialist nature of Zionism in Palestine
was ultimately accepted and actively supported
by most of the leaders of the World Zionist Organization
(WZO). Men like Chaim Weizmann, who
were not themselves socialists or communists, nonetheless
became convinced that it would only be by
a socialist line of economic development that all available
resources could be directed toward the
rapid absorption of a maximum number of Jewish immigrants.(18)
In the early 1920s, Weizmann
observed that middle- and upper-class Jews from Europe
or the United States were not moving to
Palestine in significant numbers. Only the Jewish working
class of Europe had the desire to immigrate
in numbers high enough to "upbuild" Palestine
and make it Jewish. Those Jews with money to invest
who did immigrate behaved like good capitalists and hired
the cheapest labor they could find. This
turned out to be the local Arab population and not their
fellow Jews.(19)

David Ben-Gurion Illegally Manufactured Nuclear Weapons

( Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists )

Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion feared for
Israel's future,
and Israeli success in the 1956 Sinai campaign did nothing
to allay
those fears. In the late 1950s, Ben Gurion told an aide:
"I could
not sleep all night, not even for one second. I had one
fear in my
heart: a combined attack by all Arab armies."(1)

Ben Gurion was determined that Israel
should have a "nuclear option." Only a nuclear
weapon could counter
the numerical superiority of the Arabs.

When Kennedy took office in January 1961 as president
of the United
States, he was strongly committed to the goal of nonproliferation,
but the policy of how to reach that objective was yet
to evolve.
In hindsight, the case of Israel was an exception, not
only because
of Israel's geopolitical situation, but also because
of Israel's geopolitical
situation, but also because of the burden of history.
Kennedy's
nonproliferation ideal had to be compromised.

No better example of that high-level compromise exists
than the 1961
meeting between Kennedy and Ben Gurion in New York. Although
Kennedy
spoke grandly of nonproliferation, when it came to Israel,
he simply
didn't want to press the matter too hard. That set the
pattern for
the next 30-plus years. Both Israel and the United States
stumbled
jointly into opacity.

Days of crisis

The Dimona nuclear project was conceived in the midst
of an international
showdown, in the darkest hours of the Suez crisis. Britain
and France
had persuaded Israel to participate in a military effort
to help them
regain the Suez Canal, which Egypt had seized in July
1956. Although
the exercise demonstrated Israeli military capabilities,
the November
1956 campaign was a political disaster. The United States
condemned
the use of force, a determined United Nations negotiated
a ceasefire-
-and, at the height of the crisis, Soviet Premier Nikolai
Bulganin
had warned Ben Gurion that Soviet missiles could reach
Israeli targets.

In response to the Soviet threat, Foreign Minister
Golda Meir and
Shimon Peres, Ben Gurion's closest aide, flew secretly
to Paris in
the early hours of November 7 to meet with their French
colleagues,
Maurice Bourges-Manoury, the French defense minister,
and Christian
Pineau, the French foreign minister. According to French
sources,
since France could offer Israel no immediate guarantees
against Soviet
aggression, Peres suggested that after Israel withdrew
from the Sinai,
the French might provide a security guarantee in the
form of nuclear
assistance. Peres had discussed nuclear matters with
top French officials
during the spring and summer of 1956, and certain understandings
were
already in the making, but never before was the talk
as explicit as
it was that morning.(3)

It took a year of difficult, on-and-off negotiations
before a basic
understanding was formalized into a set of agreements
and contracts.
The EL-102 research reactor that the Commisariat a l'Energie
Atomique
(CEA) had agreed to sell Israel in September 1956 was
transformed
into a nuclear production reactor of roughly the same
capacity as
France's G-1 reactor at Marcoule. More significantly,
according to
Pierre Pean, author of Les Deux Bombes, the Dimona package
included
French expertise in separating plutonium. Saint Gobain
Nucleaire,
the company that had built the Marcoule plant, would
be the primary
contractor for an underground plutonium separation plant
at the reactor
site--giving Israel an unprecedented type of assistance.

It was in the political and security interests of
both France and
Israel to keep the project secret and extremely compartmentalized.
The details of the agreement, hidden to this day, were
contained in
separate political and technical sets of documents designed
to provide
the political actors with deniability about the technical
aspects
of the package. According to Pean, some elements of the
deal were
never put in writing--they remained oral understandings
between individuals.
The contract for the reprocessing plant was signed directly
with Saint
Gobain, and the deal "went underground" through
a dummy organization.(4)

The Dimona project was complex, controlversial, and
sensitive, and
it would take a number of years to complete. It was particularly
vulnerable
to political upheaval, and the fragility of France's
Fourth Republic
made even the strongest supporters of the French-Israeli
alliance
believe that the cooperative effort was unnatural and
would be short-
lived. The ever-present fear of the project's architects--especially
those on the Israeli side--was that a new French government
might
cancel the agreement. Another fear was that the U.S.
government would
discover the project early on and exert pressure on Israel
and France
to abort it.

Turning point

In 1960 both fears appeared to materialize. Charles
de Gaulle had
been given extraordinary powers to establish the Fifth
Republic in
late 1958. By May 1960, his foreign minister, Maurice
Couve de Murville,
notified the Israeli ambassador, Walter Eitan, that
France had reconsidered
the arrangement. De Gaulle wanted Israel to lift the
secrecy surrounding
the construction of Dimona and declare the reactor's
peaceful nature,
backed by foreign, perhaps international, inspection.
If Israel did
not accept these conditions, France would not supply
fuel for the
reactor.(5)

The French change of heart caused a nearcrisis in
Ben Gurion's inner
circle. The collapse of the project would have had far-reaching
political
consequences--Ben Gurion and Peres had authorized and
executed it
virtually on their own.

Ben Gurion and de Gaulle got along well enough at
a hastily arranged
summit meeting on June 14, but the discussion produced
no solution
to the nuclear crisis. The conversation was a chatty
exchange about
world affairs and ideas between two elderly statesmen;
the real issue
was scarcely mentioned. When the meeting ended without
a discussion
of nuclear and military cooperation, de Gaulle suggested
another meeting
three days later.(6)

On June 17 the two leaders met privately, and this
time the conversation
began with the atom. Both sides wanted to avoid a confrontation,
but
no immediate solution was found. According to Ben Gurion's
biographer,
Michael Bar Zohar, Ben Gurion said he understood de
Gaulle's reservations
about French participation in the building of the reactor,
and he
pledged that Israel would not build nuclear weapons.
Then he suggested
leaving the practical details of future nuclear cooperation
to Peres
and Pierre Guillaumat, the French minister of nuclear
energy.(7) De
Gaulle was unconvinced, although he promised to reconsider
his position.

But de Gaulle did not change his mind. On August 1,
1960, Couve de
Murville reported that France intended to end its assistance
if Israel
continued to oppose outside inspection. But, he added,
France would
compensate Israel for the financial damage it would suffer
by the
termination.(8) After consulting with his advisers, Ben
Gurion rejected
the offer of compensation and sent Peres to Paris to
try to negotiate
a compromise.

By November, a compromise was reached. Although the
French government
would end its direct involvement in Dimona, French companies
with
existing contracts would stay on, which meant that Israel
could continue
the project on its own. Israel promised to make a public
announcement
about Dimona and declare its peaceful purpose; in exchange,
France
agreed to drop its insistence on outside inspection.(9)

De Gaulle believed he had ended the project. He writes
in his memoirs:
"So ended, in particular, the cooperation offered
by us for the beginning,
near Beersheba, of a plant for the converting of uranium
into plutonium,
from which one bright day atomic bombs could emerge."(10)
But de
Gaulle's statement is more self-serving than accurate.
According to
Pean, the compromise that Peres reached had saved precisely
that part
of the project--the plutonium reprocessing plant--that
de Gaulle was
determined to stop.

Nevertheless, Israel learned that there were political
limits on its
nuclear will. Ben Gurion had to pledge--albeit secretly--that
Israel
would not build nuclear weapons.

Dimona unveiled

Less than six months later--even before Israel had
fulfilled its part
of the agreement to announce Dimona publicly--the secret
was abruptly
spilled on the other side of the Atlantic. Israel was
preparing to
announce the project when it was preempted by foreign
press reports
and by U.S. determination to be the first to put the
issue on the
table.(11)

As early as 1958, the United States knew something
about Dimona--the
CIA's U-2 reconnaissance program had detected unusual
excavation and
construction work in the Negev desert. To the photo interpreters
it
looked unmistakably like a nuclear plant in the earliest
phase of
construction.(12) Some time in late 1958 or early 1959,
this finding
was reported to both President Eisenhower and Atomic
Energy Commission
(AEC) Chairman Lewis Strauss.

By December 2, 1960, the State Department had established
that "a
significant atomic installation was in fact being built
near Beersheba."
(13) By this time, the evidence was too compelling and
too widely
known to be ignored. Meanwhile, American embassy officials
in Paris
had learned bits and pieces about "French participation
in the alleged
construction of a nuclear power plant in Beersheba, Israel."(14)
Also
by early December there were signs that an Israeli announcement
was
imminent; the U.S. ambassador to Israel reported on December
3 that
Ben Gurion was planning to make the announcement the
following week
at the dedication of a new university near Beersheba.(15)

In the end, the departing Eisenhower administration
decided to preempt
the anticipated announcement. On December 8, CIA Director
Allen Dulles
reported in a meeting of the National Security Council
"that Israel
was constructing, with French assistance a nuclear complex
in the
Negev," and added that "CIA and AEC experts
believe ... that the Israeli
nuclear complex cannot be solely for peaceful purposes.(16)
On the
next day, Secretary of State Christian Herter summoned
the Israeli
ambassador, presented him with U.S. intelligence findings
about the
reactor under construction, and expressed U.S. concern.
Amb. Abraham
Harman "disclaimed any detailed knowledge of the
reactor installation
near Dimona."(17) The administration also briefed
Congress's Joint
Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE).

The December 19 issue of Time--which hit the newsstands
on the thirteenth-
-disclosed that a special congressional meeting had concerned
"atomic
development" by an "nth state" that was
"neither of the communist
nor the NATO bloc." Three days later, the Daily
Express of London
identified Israel as the state, adding that "British
and American
intelligence authorities believe that the Israelis are
well on the
way to building their first experimental nuclear bomb."

On December 18, AEC Chairman John McCone said on Meet
the Press that
Israel was secretly building a nuclear reactor and that
the United
States had questioned Israel about it. McCone said that
the United
States had "only informal and unofficial information"
concerning Israeli
nuclear activities, but he pointed out that the possession
of a reactor
in itself did not "create a weapons capability."

The Israeli reactor was a front-page story in the
next day's New York
Times. The story, now known to have been written with
"help" from
McCone, revealed that "U.S. officials [are] studying
with mounting
concern recent evidence indicating that Israel, with
assistance from
France, may be developing the capacity to produce nuclear
weapons."
The State Department also acknowledged for the first
time that Herter
had summoned the Israeli ambassador on December 9 to
express concern
and ask for information, and that "a response has
not yet been received."

On the same day, the Israeli reactor was the topic
of a presidential
conference. The minutes, declassified in 1993, indicate
that both
Secretary of State Herter and CIA Director Allen Dulles
referred to
Dimona as "a plutonium production plant." Eisenhower
commented that
the cost of the Dimona plant was between 100 to 200 million
dollars.(18)

The next day, December 20, the political significance
of Dimona was
hyped in a follow-up story that revealed that Israel
had led the United
States to believe that the nuclear site was a textile
plant, and that
the issue had been discussed in a high-level briefing
at the White
House the previous day.

On December 21, the Israeli reply to the U.S. request
for information
was still awaited, and the New York Times reported that
"a note of
irritation crept into public and private statements of
U.S. officials
today about Israel's building of a nuclear reactor."

Not only was Dimona's secrecy shattered, but the secrecy
itself was
fueling speculation about Israeli nuclear intentions
and capabilities.
The Dimona story had reached the level of an international
crisis
and Israel could no longer delay its official response.

The first Israeli comments were low key, unofficial,
and, to some
extent, ambiguous. The first came from Israeli Atomic
Energy Commission
(IAEC) Chairman Ernst D. Bergmann, who called the report
that Israel
was developing nuclear weapons "flattering, but
untrue." He added
that "Israel's industry in the present state is
incapable of undertaking
such a task."(19) On the other hand, Bergmann said
nothing about Israeli
intentions.

The first official confirmation of French assistance
came the following
day from Paris, in separate statements issued by the
French foreign
ministry and the Israeli embassy.(20) The Israeli embassy
noted that
Israel's atomic development was "dedicated exclusively"
to the needs
of industry, agriculture, medicine and science. The French
statement
went beyond that and insisted that "all necessary
provisions have
been taken by France to assure that the French aid to
Israel in the
nuclear field would be used only for peaceful purposes."

These statements from lower-level officials did not
restore calm.
On the contrary, the long delay in response to an official
request
for information and the continued absence of an authoritative
public
statement from the highest level--Ben Gurion--only heightened
the
atmosphere of crisis. After three days of intense speculation,
Israel
took public and private actions to defuse the crisis.
On December
21, Ambassador Harman formally replied to Secretary Herter's
query
of December 9, assuring him that "the new Israeli
reactor, now in
the early stages of construction, is for peaceful purposes
only."(21)

Finally, Ben Gurion issued a circumspect statement
on the matter to
the Knesset. It was the first time that Israelis had
been told that
their nation was indeed constructing a nuclear reactor
in the Negev.
Ben Gurion repeated that the reactor's purposes were
peaceful. His
statement was also the first and only time that an Israeli
prime minister
has made a public statement aobut Dimona:

"The development of the Negev--which we regard
as our principal task
for the next decade--requires broad and manifold scientific
research.
For this purpose we have established at Beersheba a scientific
institute
for research in problems of arid zones and desert flora
and fauna.
We are also engaged at this time in the construction
of a research
reactor with a capacity of 24,000 thermal kilowatts,
which will serve
the needs of industry, agriculture, health and science.
This reactor
will also be used to train Israeli scientists and technologists
for
the future construction of an atomic power station within
a presumed
period of 10 to 15 years."(22)

The reactor, the statement continued, was "designed
exclusively for
peaceful purposes." It would be constructed under
the direction of
Israeli experts and would not be completed for three
or four years.
When finished, it would be "open" to trainees
from other countries.

Ben Gurion dismissed the report that Israel was building
a bomb as
a "deliberate or unwitting untruth," adding
that Israel had proposed
"general and total disarmament in Israel and the
neighboring Arab
states" with mutual rights of inspection. In line
with the Couve de
Murville-Peres agreement, the statement made no mention
of France
as the reactor designer, stating only that the reactor
was being constructed
under Israeli direction. By that time, of course, the
French government
was no longer involved.

As a whole, Ben Gurion's statement was true; he and
others hoped to
build a major power station in the Negev and they expected
Dimona
to be the first step in that direction. And Ben Gurion
could readily
deny reports that Israel was manufacturing nuclear weapons,
which
it was certainly not doing in December 1960. But he was
careful not
to be specific about the future. The claim that the reactor
"was designed
exclusively for peaceful purposes" was, from Ben
Gurion's perspective,
a true statement. As he put the matter in a letter to
President Kennedy
18 months later, "We have to secure our peace through
strength."(23)
The purpose of a nuclear option was to avoid war.

Still, Ben Gurion did not tell the whole truth. He
was persuaded that
Israel must have a nuclear option. But for now, his goal
was to allay
American suspicions and political pressures. A confrontation
with
the United States might have left Israel with no nuclear
project and
a ruined relationship with the United States.

The strategy seemed to work. The U.S. State Department
issued a statement
that "the government of Israel has given assurances
that its new reactor
... is dedicated entirely to peaceful purposes,"
adding that "it is
gratifying to note that as made public the Israeli atomic
energy program
does not represent a cause for concern."(24)

Whether the State Department read Ben Gurion's assurances
as going
beyond what he actually said--after all, he gave no future
pledge
of any kind--it was certainly convenient to read them
that way.(25)
Indeed, the Israeli statement created an American expectation
"that
Israel will make its reactor accessible to the safeguards
system of
the International Atomic Energy Agency," even though
Ben Gurion had
neither said nor hinted anything of the kind. But Israel's
assurances
gave both sides what they wanted.

Five questions

The Eisenhower administration, which had only months
before celebrated
the opening of Israel's first research reactor at Nachal
Soreq supplied
by the U.S. Atoms for Peace program, had been left in
the dark, and
it was determined to receive further clarification and
concrete commitments.
Ben Gurion had left many issues unresolved, but from
now on the U.S.
government would seek answers in a less public fashion.

On December 24, Ogden Reid, the U.S. ambassador to
Israel, met with
Ben Gurion at the prime minister's home in Tel Aviv.
Reid, now a busines
consultant in New York, recalls that he first gave Ben
Gurion a Christmas
card from President Eisenhower--a card for which he "expressed
real
appreciation." Reid then got down to business, conveying
the administration'
s concern with the possibility of nuclear proliferation
in the Middle
East.

Ben Gurion was "direct and spirited, as always,"
recalls Reid, but
"friendly." At one point, however, he expressed
"mild irritation"
in reference to the continuing flap over Israel's reactor.
"Why in
the States," Reid recalls Ben Gurion asking, "is
everything being
told everybody?"

On January 4, Reid again met with Ben Gurion and presented
him with
five questions that the United States would like to have
answered.(26)
At this point, the historical record gets muddled.

Ben Gurion's biographer, Bar Zohar, suggests that
the questions were
presented as an ultimatum--that Reid asked that the questions
be answered
by midnight.(27) Reid, however, says Bar Zohar got it
dead wrong.
There was no ultimatum--"sovereign states don't
act that way." The
questions were in fact designed to elicit "clarifications,"
says Reid:

What were Israel's present plans for disposing of
the plutonium that
would be bred in the reactor? Will Israel agree to adequate
safeguards?
Will Israel permit qualified scientists from the IAEA
or other friendly
quarters to visit the reactor--and, if so, when? Is a
third reactor
in either the construction or planning stage? Can Israel
state categorically
that it has no plans for producing nuclear weapons?

Reid says Ben Gurion commented on the questions at
the January 4 meeting,
and there was no later meeting to discuss the answers
to the questions.
Reid's cable back to Washington describing Ben Gurion's
"comments"
is still classified.

In contrast, Bar Zohar asserts that the prime minister
was "infuriated
by this disrepectful demand" and that he did not
answer immediately.
Rather, he later summoned Reid to his residence at Sde
Boker in the
Negev, lectured him--"You must talk to us as equals,
or not talk to
us at all"--and then responded to the questions
one by one. According
to Bar Zohar:

"As to the first question, he replied: 'As far
as we know, those who
sell uranium do so on condition that the plutonium reverts
to them.'
In reply to the second question, concerning 'guarantees,'
the Old
Man replied: 'International guarantees--no. We don't
want hostile
states meddling in our business.' At the same time he
expressed complete
willingness to permit visits by scientists from a friendly
state,
or from an international organization, but not immediately.
'There
is anger in Israel over the American action in leaking
this matter,
' he said, and expressed his view that the visit would
be conducted
in the course of the year. He answered in the negative
about the construction
of an additional reactor and concluded by declaring that
Israel did
not intend to manufacture nuclear weapons 'All that I
said in the
Knesset holds; it was said explicitly, and you must accept
it at face
value.'"(28)

The exchange between the departing Eisenhower administration
and the
Israeli government on the nuclear issue did not end with
Ben Gurion'
s replies. On January 11, after consulting in Jerusalem,
Ambassador
Harman met Secretary of State Herter for four hours,
primarily to
discuss Israel's nuclear energy program. The January
13 issue of Ha'
aretz reported that the discussion focused on the question
of international
control over the new reactor and the question of the
ownership of
the fissile material that it would produce.

A "secret" State Department report to the
Joint Committee on Atomic
Energy, dated January 17, detailed U.S. understandings
about Dimona.(29)
Perhaps the most important aspect of this document is
that it suggests
that the U.S. government took Ben Gurion's private and
public statements
as a solemn pledge not to manufacture nuclear weapons.

Article 6 of the report attributes Israeli secrecy
to "fears of participating
foreign companies over the prospects of [an] Arab boycott."
The document
also includes three assertions that go beyond Ben Gurion's
public
statement:

"There is no plutonium now in Israel and plutonium
from the reactor
will, as a condition attached to purchases of uranium
abroad, return
to the supplying country....

"In addition to the reactor the complex will
include a hot laboratory,
cold laboratory, waste disposal plant, a facility for
rods, offices
including a library unit and a medical unit....

"The reactor and ancillary facilities are expected
to cost $34 million,
of which $17.8 million would be foreign exchange. The
reactor itself
is expected to cost $15.4 million, of which $10 million
would be foreign
exchange."

Ben Gurion's month-long dealings with the departing
Eisenhower
administration
set the basic parameters under which he would steer his
beloved project
between resolve and caution. As I interpret it, Ben Gurion's
first
priority at this point was to complete the physical infrastructure
needed for a weapons option. All else--matters of ultimate
policy,
doctrine, and posture--could wait.

Meanwhile, he had not compromised the basics of the
project. For example,
he evaded the sensitive question of the ownership of
the plutonium,
giving a vague and unverifiable pledge. He also rejected
outright
the notion of formal international inspections, whether
by the IAEA
or any other body. To avoid an allout confrontation,
he was ready
to accept a visit by scientists from the United States
or other friendly
states, although he made it clear that time was needed
to prepare
for a visit and that it would be carried out under Israeli
control.

There events set the stage, in form and in substance,
for the nuclear
dialogue between Ben Gurion and Kennedy. This dialogue,
which again
threatened confrontation, consisted of secret communications
between
the two governments, at times through high-level emissaries,
but often
in private communications between the two states' chief
executives.

Face-to-face in New York

John Fitzgerald Kennedy had a great intellectual and
emotional commitment
to the cause of nuclear nonproliferation, and he expressed
his personal
sense of urgency regarding proliferation both in public
and private.
In February 1960, France had become the fourth member
of the nuclear
club, and the question Kennedy faced was who would be
next. In one
of his most memorable speeches, Kennedy described his
nuclear nightmare:

"Personally I am haunted by the feeling that
by 1970, unless we are
successful, there may be ten nuclear powers instead of
four, and by
1975, 15 to 20.... I see the possibility in the 1970s
of the president
of the United States having to face a world in which
15 or 25 nations
may have these weapons. I regard this as the greatest
possible danger
and hazard."(30)

His personal commitment is apparent in the way he
dealt with the Israeli
nuclear issue after he assumed office on January 20,
1961. Only ten
days later, Secretary of State Dean Rusk gave the president
a secret
two-page memo on Israel's atomic activities, which noted
the "categoric
assurances" obtained from Ben Gurion "that
Israel does not have plans
for developing atomic weaponry."(31) As to U.S.
interests in the Israeli
case, the memo defined them as opposition to proliferation
in general
and a particular concern that, in response to Israeli
weapons, the
Soviets might station nuclear weapons on Arab soil.

The memo indicated that French and Israeli assurances
"appear to be
satisfactory ... [although] several minor questions still
require
clarification." These "minor questions"
apparently concerned inspections
at Dimona and ownership of plutonium, issues that had
already been
raised in Ben Gurion's discussion with Ambassador Reid.
The memo added,
"At the moment, we are encouraging the Israelis
to permit a qualified
scientist from the United States or another friendly
power to visit
the Dimona installation."

In Israel, the "Lavon affair" continued
to unravel. That domestic
scandal stemmed from a failed covert operation in Egypt
in July 1954.
Pinhas Lavon, who had replaced Ben Gurion in 1954 as
minister of defense,
blamed military intelligence for acting without his
knowledge and
approval. In 1960 he forcefully demanded an exoneration
from Ben Gurion,
and the issue plunged Mapai, the ruling party, into
a massive power
struggle. Those who rallied behind Lavon also opposed
the "Young Mapai"
leaders, in particular Peres and Moshe Dayan; it was
also Peres and
Dayan who were behind the secret atomic projects. Domestic
politics
and the nuclear issue were thus entangled. Under those
circumstances,
a direct confrontation with the United States could
have wiped out
the tenuous support for the nuclear program within the
party. By late
December, Ben Gurion had already decided to resign and
to force his
party to choose between him and Lavon, but he postponed
his resignation
because of Dimona, fearing that his colleagues might
cave in to U.S.
pressure on Dimona in his absence.(32)

By January 31 Ben Gurion had submitted his resignation,
and a few
days later Lavon was removed from his post. Ben Gurion
continued to
serve as interim prime minister, awaiting the new election
in August.
But the nuclear dispute with the United States was neither
resolved
nor defused. Kennedy had a "personal interest in
the subject of Israel'
s atomic nuclear activities"; he was determined
to do his best to
halt nuclear proliferation, in the Middle East and elsewhere.(33)

Israel's verbal assurances were welcome, but they
were not sufficient.
The new administration insisted that Ben Gurion's statements
must
be verified by an early inspection at Dimona. Neither
government wanted
to dramatize the conflict over "the sensitive issue"--the
code name
the Israeli press adopted for Dimona--but as long as
it remained unresolved
it threatened the unique U.S.-Israeli relationship. When
the Kennedy
administration learned that Israel was interested in
the Mirage IV,
a French nuclear-capable bomber, its suspicions were
further aroused.(34)

At this point, the project's political opponents intensified
their
objections to the nuclear project.(35) Given this situation,
it would
have been virtually impossible to sustain the nuclear
project against
the full and open opposition of the U.S. government.
From Ben Gurion'
s perspective, a confrontation had to be avoided at all
costs.

In late March Ben Gurion decided to arrange a meeting
with Kennedy.
After conquering scheduling problems--including the State
Department'
s opposition to an official visit--the two leaders agreed
to meet
privately at New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotel. The meeting
was set
for May 30, at the end of an official Ben Gurion visit
to Canada.

To smooth the way for the meeting, Israel extended
a special invitation
to two distinguished American physicists--I.I. Rabi of
Columbia University
and Eugene Wigner of Princeton (who just happened to
be in Israel
when he got the "spontaneous" invitation).
Both were Jews with a close
relationship to the Israeli scientific establishment.

Rabi and Wigner visited Dimona in late April or early
May, escorted
by Amos de Shalit, one of Israel's most respected--and
charming--physicists.
The visitors proved to be friendly indeed; they reported
no evidence
of weapon-related activity.(36) In early May, Rusk gave
Kennedy the
visitors' report.

Kennedy had wanted to portray his informal meeting
with Ben Gurion
as a "spontaneous idea." When plans for the
meeting leaked out, it
was characterized as an informal encounter made possible
by "the coincidence
of their presence in New York"--an explanation that
was as far from
the truth as one could get.(37) The meeting was, after
all, the real
purpose behind Ben Gurion's trip to North America. According
to his
biographer, the Israeli prime minister was "very
tense, fearing that
Kennedy's stiff position on the matter of the reactor
would severely
jeopardize the relationship."(38)

This was the second time that the 74-year-old Ben
Gurion had met with
Kennedy, his junior by 30 years. Of their first meeting
a year earlier,
Ben Gurion said, "He looked to me like a 25-year-old
boy.... At first,
I did not take him seriously."

Although Ben Gurion had anticipated it with great
anxiety, the meeting
was anticlimactic. It was friendly, at times even chatty.
What set
the relaxed and amicable tone was the "good report"
that Kennedy had
received from Rusk just a few weeks earlier regarding
the Rabi-Wigner
visit. The following account of their exchange is based
on official
declassified U.S. and Israeli transcripts:(39)

After a brief exchange of amenities, the two leaders
"plunged into
a discussion of Israel's nuclear reactor." Ben Gurion
began by saying
that he had intended to brief the president, but this
was redundant
since the U.S. scientists had already visited the site.
Kennedy responded
that he had seen the report and that it was "very
helpful." He added
that on the same theory that "a woman should not
only be virtuous,
but should appear to be virtuous," it was important
not only that
Israel's purposes were peaceful, but that other nations
were convinced
that this was the case.

In response, Ben Gurion explained Israel's interest
in nuclear energy:
Israel lacked fresh water, and development was possible
only if a
cheap source of energy could be found to allow the desalinization
of sea water. Israel believed that atomic power, although
still expensive,
would one day be a source of cheap energy.

After outlining Israel's long-term plan for desalinization,
Ben Gurion
went on to discuss the present. Since his comments are
at the heart
of the matter, it is worthwhile to record them as they
appear in both
transcripts. The text of the Israeli note-taker (Ambassador
Harman):

"We are asked whether it is for peace. For the
time being the only
purposes are for peace. Not now but after three or four
years we shall
have a pilot plant for separation, which is needed anyway
for a power
reactor. There is no such intention now, not for four
or five years.
But we will see what happens in the Middle East. It does
not depend
on us. Maybe Russia won't give bombs to China or Egypt,
but maybe
Egypt will develop them."

The American note-taker (Myer Feldman, Kennedy's special
adviser on
Israel) wrote:

"Israel's main--and for the time being, only--purpose
is this (cheap
energy, etc.), the prime minister said, adding that 'We
do not know
what will happen in the future; in three or four years
we might have
a need for a plant to process plutonium.' Commenting
on the political
and strategic implications of atomic power and weaponry,
the prime
minister said he does believe that 'in ten or 15 years
the Egyptians
presumably could achieve it themselves.'"

Kennedy responded by returning to his earlier point.
While he appreciated
Israel's desalinization needs, it was important for the
United States
that it not appear "that Israel is preparing for
atomic weapons,"
especially given the close relationship between the United
States
and Israel, because then the UAR (Egypt) would try to
do the same.
"Perhaps in the next five years atomic weapons will
proliferate, but
we don't want it to happen."

At this point, the two versions differ slightly. According
to the
Israeli text, Kennedy said, "The report ... is a
fine report and it
would be helpful if we could get this information out."
The American
summary is more explicit: "The president then asked
again whether,
as a matter of reassurance, the Arab states might be
advised of findings
of the American scientists who had viewed the Dimona
reactor."

In any case, Kennedy asked Ben Gurion to let him share
the scientists'
findings, and both versions confirm that Ben Gurion
gave Kennedy
a free hand to do whatever he saw fit with the report.
Kennedy then
pushed the point one step further, asking, "because
we [the United
States and Israel] are close friends," whether it
would not be helpful
to let "neutral scientists" such as Scandinavians
or Swiss observe
the reactor. To this, too, Ben Gurion had no objection,
and Kennedy
expressed his satisfaction with the reply. With this
sense of mutual
understanding, the nuclear issue was dropped and the
conversation
shifted to the general issue of Israel's security.

Tacit understandings

In his meeting with Kennedy, Ben Gurion had followed
the same circumspect
path he had taken in his first statement to the Knesset
in December
1960. He desperately wanted to buy time for Dimona's
completion while
avoiding either a confrontation or an outright lie, and
without making
impossible commitments with regard to the future. It
was a juggler'
s act, and he knew it. His tension before the meeting
highlights the
point. He must have decided that it was too risky to
admit Israel'
s interest in nuclear weapons--and the reactions of both
the Eisenhower
and Kennedy administrations suggest he was correct.

Ben Gurion hid the real and immediate purpose of Dimona
behind a civilian,
peaceful, and legitimate rationale--the need for cheap
power, especially
for desalinization. This explanation was not without
foundation. On
the enthusiastic advice of Bergmann, his scientific adviser,
Ben Gurion
was fully convinced that nuclear energy would be the
key to the Zionist
vision of a blooming Negev. Faith in nuclear energy was
a familiar
Ben Gurion theme, and Bergmann often argued that there
was only one
type of nuclear energy, which could be used for peaceful
and non-peaceful
purposes.

Although Ben Gurion clearly overplayed Israel's interest
in civil
nuclear energy, at no time during the meeting did he
explicitly exclude
a possible future interest in nuclear weapons. Both records
of the
conversation clearly indicate that Ben Gurion pledged
virtually nothing
binding; his choice of wording was deliberately ambiguous.
And he
deliberately introduced an element of tentativeness,
even ambiguity,
to balance his stress on peaceful purposes. Nor did
he hide Israel'
s intention to build "a pilot plant for [plutonium]
separation" in
four or five years. Notably, Kennedy made no comment
on the matter.

In fact, Kennedy asked very little of Ben Gurion.
Not only did he
fail to ask about the separation plant, he did not bring
up the question
of the ownership of the plutonium that might be produced
there. Apart
from stressing the U.S. commitment to nonproliferation
in general,
and concern about Egypt in particular, Kennedy asked
only to make
the results of the scientists' visit known to other nations--meaning
the Arabs--to which Ben Gurion gave full approval. Even
Kennedy's
request to let scientists from a neutural state visit
Dimona was raised
generally, not as an urgent matter.

The reason for the tenor of the meeting, I think,
is that both leaders
wanted to avoid confrontation--and each had a sense of
his own political
limits. Based on these understandings, the two leaders
created the
rules of the game on the nuclear issue as they stumbled
along. Kennedy
raised no questions that went beyond what Ben Gurion
told him on his
own. For example, Kennedy did not question Israel's need
for two research
reactors--a small American reactor and a larger one of
French design
that could produce significant amounts of plutonium.
Nor did Kennedy
ask why Israel needed a plutonium separation plant or
why Israel would
invest so much of its financial resources in a large
research reactor
that was ostensibly only an interim step in building
a nuclear power
plant, or why the Franco-Israeli deal had been kept secret--all
issues
that had led to the confrontation in December and January.

Nor did Kennedy try to extract a promise that Israel
would not develop
a nuclear capability in the future. Instead, Kennedy
limited himself
to making the U.S. position on nonproliferation clear
and pointing
out the need to assure others of Israel's peaceful intentions.

In turn, Ben Gurion respected Kennedy's political
needs. He did not
question U.S. nonproliferation policy as applied to Israel.
Later
in the conversation, Ben Gurion expressed at length his
long-term
worries about Israeli security and the geopolitical vulnerability
of the tiny Jewish state, but he made no explicit effort
to use those
issues to legitimize Israel's interest in acquiring an
independent
nuclear deterrent. Only a year earlier France had gone
nuclear; no
nonproliferation norm existed. But Ben Gurion did not
try to convince
Kennedy that Israel was politically or morally justified
in pursuing
the nuclear option.

What created the positive atmosphere was, of course,
the U.S. scientists'
report. Because it is still not available, we do not
really know
what the two physicists saw or were told by their Israeli
escorts.
With due respect to Rabi's qualifications as a physicist,
it should
be noted that he was not an expert in nuclear reactor
design. Wigner,
however, had worked in this field during the Manhattan
Project. But
the Dimona site was still under construction, and the
visitors were
escorted by one of Israel's most enlightened and charming
physicists.
Many years later, McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's national
security adviser,
said that U.S. visits to Dimona in the 1960s "were
not as seriously
and rigorously conducted as they would have had to be
to get the real
story."(40)

Although the nuclear issue was the reason for the
New York meeting
and the cause of Ben Gurion's apprehensions, it took
no more than
ten to 15 minutes. Kennedy exerted no new pressures,
and Ben Gurion
had no need to use the arguments he had prepared. As
his biographer
wrote, "Ben Gurion felt relieved. The reactor was
saved, at least
for the time being."(41)

In retrospect, the meeting at the Waldorf Astoria
anticipated much
of the future by setting, however unintentionally, the
parameters
by which both nations conducted their dealings on "the
sensitive issue."
The meeting allowed the issue of Dimona to drop from
the U.S.-Israeli
agenda for almost two years, while other issues--such
as refugees
and water--became central. But Dimona resurfaced again
in May and
June 1963, in part because it was about to become operational
and
in part because Ben Gurion had pressed the United States
for security
assurances. In turn, Kennedy spoke of his concern about
the weapons
potential of Dimona.

In correspondence that brought U.S.-Israeli relations
to the brink
of crisis and which may have contributed to Ben Gurion's
resignation
in mid-June at 76 years of age, the new prime minister,
Levi Eshkol,
eventually found a formula that satisfied both parties.
Israel would
allow one U.S. inspection per year, as Ben Gurion had
previously proposed,
and it would pledge not to be the first to introduce
nuclear weapons
into the Middle East.

The mid-1963 agreement notwithstanding, the subsequent
tacit
understandings
were fateful. The legacy of the 1961 Kennedy-Ben Gurion
meeting was
lasting. As both leaders tested each other's political
wills--in 1961
and again in 1963--the rules of a subtle game evolved.
Unknowingly,
President Kennedy became Ben Gurion's chief partner
in the making
of Israel's unique nuclear posture. The seeds of Israeli
nuclear opacity
and the American response had been planted.

(17.)"Summary of Additional Recent Information
on Israeli Atomic Energy
Program," enclosed in a letter from Assistant Secretary
of State William
S. Macomber to James T. Ramey, Executive Director of
the Joint Committee
on Atomic Energy, U.S. Congress, Jan. 19, 1961. National
Security
Archives (released in 1991 pursuant to Freedom of Information
Act
request).

(30.)Public Papers of the Presidents of the United
States: John F.
Kennedy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1964),
p. 280.

(31.)"Israel's Atomic Energy Activities."

(32.)Bar Zohar, Ben Gurion, pp. 1392, 1506, 1508.

(33.)"Memorandum to the Secretary of State on
the Israeli Reactor
Prepared by the State Department and Recommended to be
Signed by the
Secretary," G. Lewis to Dean Rusk, March 1, 1961.
John F. Kennedy
Library, POF; Israel, Box 119a.

Adapted from a longer manuscript titled "Stumbling
Into Opacity: The
Untold Ben Gurion-Kennedy Dimona Exchange (1961--1963)."
Avner Cohen
is co-director of the Nuclear Arms Control in the Middle
East Project
and a fellow at the Center for International Studies
at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.

Ben-Gurion's Role in the Holocaust.(book reviews)

( Commentary ) American Jewish Committee

Three years ago I wrote a harsh review for the weekly
Forward of
a book called The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the
Holocaust
by Tom Segev, an Israeli journalist turned popular historian.
Segev'
s book was in large part an attack on the leaders of
the jewish settlement
(Yishuv) in Palestine during World War II, and especially
on David
Ben-Gurion, then head of the Jewish Agency Executive,
for being either
shockingly unconcerned or callously instrumental in their
attitude
toward the murder of European Jewry.

In my review of the book I dwelt particularly on
this thesis, citing
as an example of Segev's dishonest argumentation a passage
deliberately
fostering the illusion that a March 1942 Hebrew newspaper
editorial
minimizing the dimensions of the Holocaust had appeared
months later
than it did. Although I suspected The Seventh Million
of containing
many more such misleading sleights of hand, I was not
well-read enough
in the period to spot most of them.

Shabtai Teveth, an Israeli journalist turned serious
historian,
and a biographer of David Ben-Gurion, is well-read in
it - and has
confirmed my suspicions. With Tom Segev's book as his
main target,
he has mounted a devastating counterattack not just
on Segev himself
but on the entire phenomenon of what he calls the "Jewish
revisionism"
of "Jews blaming Jews for not having rescued Europe's
Jews from the
Holocaust" and even "for helping the Nazis
bring about the Holocaust."
In doing so, he has shown how a disparate coalition
of historical
revisionists who otherwise have little in common - right-wing
critics
of Ben-Gurion and his colleagues, left-wing ideologues
in Israel and
elsewhere, ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists, post-Zionist
"new historians"
- have joined over the years to cite and repeat each
other's distortions,
thereby creating the impression of a formidable body
of scholarly
literature sustaining their claims when in fact there
is none at all.

One of the many examples that Teveth analyzes is
that of the so-
called "Europa Plan," as part of which, in
the first half of 1943,
negotiations were conducted with a high-ranking SS officer
named
Dieter Wisleceny who had offered to stop the shipment
of 2.5 million
Jews to the death camps in return for $2-3 million. A
go-between in
these talks was the ultra-orthodox Hungarian rabbi Michael
Dov-Ber
Weissmandel, who later wrote a book accusing the Zionist
leadership
of sabotaging the plan. To support his case, Weissmandel
cited a letter
he claimed to have seen that had been written to Zionist
activists
in Slovakia by a field worker in Geneva named Nathan
Schwalb; in that
letter, Schwalb allegedly explained to his colleagues
that Zionism,
in order to sting the world's conscience after the war,
needed not
live Jews but dead ones, and that the sum of money he
was enclosing
was intended to provide solely for the private escape
of the letter'
s recipients.

Weissmandel's accusation was first picked up and
widely circulated
after the war by his ultra-Orthodox brethren. It was
then repeated
by the parliamentary opposition in Israel in connection
with the Rudolf
Kasztner trial in the mid-1950's, which involved charges
of Zionist-
Nazi complicity in Hungary; it formed the basis of the
anti-Zionist
drama Perdition (1986), written by the non-Jewish English
playwright
Jim Allen; and it is accepted as factual by Segev. Yet
as Teveth shows,
not only was the SS officer almost certainly a swindler
who had no
intention, let alone capability, of making good on his
promise; and
not only did the Jewish Agency Executive in Palestine,
despite its
awareness of this, try hard to come up with the money
(a sum equivalent
to a far larger amount today, and not easily raisable
under wartime
conditions when ordinary travel and mail were disrupted),
but Schwalb
himself worked tirelessly on behalf of the Europa Plan.
He never wrote
the letter which Weissmandel insisted he had seen.

Or take the notorious "Trucks for Blood"
episode in mid-1944, which
involved a real (if not necessarily sincere) Nazi offer,
apparently
originating with Adolf Eichmann and made to a Hungarian
Zionist named
Joel Brand, to trade a million Hungarian Jews for 10,000
trucks to
be supplied to the Germans by the Allies. According to
Segev in The
Seventh Million, even if

the Jewish Agency was unable, by itself, to deliver
10,000 trucks
to the Nazis ... it would seem that [it] did not do all
it could to
lead on the Germans behind the backs of the British....
[It] was time
for a great bluff. The Yishuv leadership could have disobeyed
the
British orders [not to deal with Eichmann's representatives]
and negotiated
secretly with the Nazis... but nothing was done.

As Teveth documents, however, from the moment Brand
landed in Istanbul
in mid-May until his release from British preventive
detention in
Cairo in October, when there were no longer any Hungarian
Jews left
to save, the Jewish Agency made frantic efforts to have
him sent back
to Hungary with an Allied acceptance, real or pretended,
of Eichmann'
s offer. The British, who were perhaps more afraid of
a million Jews
with nowhere to go but Palestine than of the use the
Germans might
make of the trucks, would not even let the Agency's "foreign
minister,
" Moshe Sharett, meet with Brand, much less return
Brand to Budapest
to try to string Eichmann along. Even to bluff one needs
some cards;
Ben-Gurion had none.

In case after case like this, Teveth demonstrates
that, despite
assertions to the contrary, the Zionist leadership in
Palestine did
what it could, and that if it saved pitifully few Jews,
this was because
there was pitifully little it could do. Without an army,
air force,
navy, or diplomatic corps; with no means of reliable
contact with
operatives behind Nazi lines; with hardly any money;
with no support
from, or leverage on, the world's governments and little
interest
on the part of the world's press; totally dependent for
the simplest
logistical support on hostile or uncaring British officials
in Jerusalem
and London; exposed until the battle of El Alamein in
late 1942 to
Rommel's threatened conquest of Palestine, which would
have sent them
to the gas chambers too, the half-million Jews of the
Yishuv were
reduced to reading of the slaughter in Europe with clenched
teeth.
Ben-Gurion spoke for his and their anguish when he cried
out to the
nations of the world...

The real question, then, is not whether there was
Zionist indifference
toward, much less collusion with, the Nazi genocide.
It is what can
have motivated and sustained such a horrendous self-accusation
among
its Jewish and Israeli propagators.

This strikes me as close to the truth. I would only
add that, when
it comes to the Holocaust, there is something for many
Jews to feel
guilty about - and if it is human nature to blame those
who produce
the greatest guilt in us, then blaming Zionism and Ben-Gurion
for
complicity in the Holocaust is not all that hard to understand.
For
the Zionists were the one element in the Jewish world
that, in the
1920's and 30's, told the jews of Europe to get out while
they could.
While the Jewish Left was urging Jews to stay and participate
in the
anti-fascist struggle; and many of the pious were exhorting
them to
put their trust in God; and the liberals and assimilationists
were
confident that the Hitlerite aberration would blow over;
and all fulminated
against being taken in by the self-serving doom-mongering
of the Zionists,
they alone consistently spoke of emigration as the only
solution
and had the prescience to realize, as Ben-Gurion declared
in January
1935, that "The disaster which has befallen German
Jewry is not limited
to Germany alone. Hitler's regime places the entire Jewish
people
in danger."

It is true that what interested the Zionists was
primarily emigration
to Palestine - the only country, they quite rightly believed,
where
there was any chance of settling large numbers of Jews;
true, too,
that even there British immigration policy, increasingly
selective
in the course of the 1930's, would sooner or later have
put a stop
to the flow. But not only could the difference between
"sooner" and
"later" have saved hundreds of thousands of
Jewish lives; it might,
by greatly increasing the Jewish population of Palestine,
have forced
the British to execute the Peel Commission plan for creating
a small
Jewish state in the late 1930's. Had such an independent
mini-state,
strongly supported by Ben-Gurion as a stopgap measure,
been established,
the dream of rescuing millions might have been realizable.

But for the most part, the Jews of Europe accepted
the arguments
of the Zionists' opponents, who were already then accusing
Zionism
of feeding off, and even cooperating with, the Nazis.
One of the Zionist
policies most castigated in this respect was the Jewish
Agency's 1933
"transfer agreement" with the Nazi ministry
of economics, which -
in technical violation of an attempted Jewish boycott
of German goods
- enabled hundreds of thousands of German Jews to come
to Palestine
by exchanging Jewish assets forcibly abandoned and confiscated
in
Germany for German industrial exports.

Such accusations had, indeed, a twisted logic, for
if the Nazis'
rise to power both confirmed Zionist predictions and
actively encouraged
Jews to leave for Palestine, it was but a small step
for anti-Zionists
to conclude that the Zionists had an interest in the
Nazis' success,
and but one step further to surmise that they must be
abetting it.
And after the war, still refusing to confront their guilt
for having
rejected and urged others to reject all of Zionism's
pleas and warnings,
some Jews took another step and supported the calumny
that, since
what had made the state of Israel possible was the Holocaust,
the
Zionists must have had a hand in that, too.

Archived for Educational Purposes only Under U.S.C. Title 17 Section 107
by Jew Watch Library at www.jewwatch.com

*COPYRIGHT NOTICE**

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in the Jew
Watch Library is archived here under fair use without profit or payment to those
who have expressed a prior interest in reviewing the included information for
personal use, non-profit research and educational purposes only.
Ref. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml